Skip to main content

The Secret World by Christopher Andrew review – a global history of espionage

From waste baskets rifled for coded messages to early uses of waterboarding … what can spies learn from the past?

Every Friday during term-time, the convenors of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar meet for tea in an old college’s combination room, beneath the gaze of a portrait of Christopher Marlowe. One of Elizabethan England’s greatest writers, Marlowe makes good company for those interested in the history of spies and spying: as a student at Cambridge in the 1580s, he slipped away from his scholarly duties and did the state some (secret) service abroad. Among the assembled scholars at the seminar, you will find Christopher Andrew, the historian behind the authorised history of MI5, who in The Secret World presents a history of intelligence from the earliest times to the present day – from ancient Greeks to WikiLeaks.

This panoptic history starts broad, sketching the place of spying and deceit in Greece, Rome and the Holy Land. In China, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War informed its readers: “Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.” The Art of War (probably written in the third century BCE, and probably not by Sun Tzu) identifies five different kinds of spy, including double agents, “inside agents” working within the enemy’s camp, and “expendable agents”, who can be used to spread disinformation. Working in secrecy and harmony, the five groups form the “divine skein”, “the treasure of a sovereign”. The Arthashastra, written around the third or fourth century BCE in India, argued similarly that a sovereign needed to use spies, including “hunchbacks, dwarfs, eunuchs, women skilled in various arts, dumb persons”, alongside poisoners and other assassins.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2EWGukW
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more